1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to computer systems and software and more particularly to the management and monitoring of Internet servers and services.
2. Description of Related Art
The data processing resources of business organizations are increasingly taking the form of a distributed computing environment in which data and processing are dispersed over a network comprising many interconnected, heterogeneous, geographically remote computers. Such a computing environment is commonly referred to as an enterprise computing environment, or simply an enterprise.
Managers of the enterprise often employ software packages known as enterprise management systems to monitor, analyze, and manage the resources of the enterprise. Enterprise management systems may provide for the collection of measurements, or metrics, concerning the resources of individual systems. For example, an enterprise management system might include a software agent on an individual computer system for the monitoring of particular resources such as CPU usage or disk access. U.S. Pat. No. 5,655,081 discloses one example of an enterprise management system. This patent is incorporated by reference as if set forth herein in its entirety.
Businesses that provide Internet-based services have particular needs which are not addressed by the approaches of current enterprise management systems. For example, current approaches may only provide for collection of statistics at the web server and may therefore not be able to piece together a global view of a transaction. Additionally, current approaches may not establish a domain-level view of an enterprise and may therefore be incapable of detecting alarm conditions relating to more than simply individual servers. As more businesses move to the Internet to establish e-commerce sites and other e-business solutions, improved systems and methods for monitoring, analyzing, and/or optimizing the sites are needed.